The present embodiments relate generally to medical devices, and more specifically, to stents having barbs protected during delivery.
Stents may be inserted into an anatomical vessel or duct for various purposes. Stents may maintain or restore patency in a formerly blocked or constricted passageway, for example, following a balloon angioplasty procedure. Other stents may be used for different procedures, for example, stents placed in or about a graft have been used to hold the graft in an open configuration to treat an aneurysm. Additionally, stents coupled to one or both ends of a graft may extend proximally or distally away from the graft to engage a healthy portion of a vessel wall away from a diseased portion of an aneurysm to provide endovascular graft fixation.
Stents may be either self-expanding or balloon-expandable, or they can have characteristics of both types of stents. Self-expanding stents may be delivered to a target site in a compressed configuration and subsequently expanded by removing a delivery sheath, removing trigger wires and/or releasing diameter reducing ties. With self-expanding stents, the stents expand primarily based on their own expansive force without the need for further mechanical expansion. In a stent made of a shape-memory alloy such as nitinol, the shape-memory alloy may be employed to cause the stent to return to a predetermined configuration upon removal of the sheath or other device maintaining the stent in its predeployment configuration.
Typically, the actuation of the trigger wire or other mechanism restraining a stent causes an immediate, full radial expansion of the stent, such that the stent engages an inner wall of a duct, vessel or the like. Barbs of the stent may engage the body passage, and the deployed stent may be difficult or impossible to recapture or reposition at this time.